The Order of Things (17 page)

‘I’m trying to find a man called Alois Bentner.’

‘So’s half the bloody world. What’s he to you?’

‘Nothing. Yet.’

‘Come to help him out, have you? Only that man’s in the shit.’

‘So everyone says.’

‘And you know different? Is that it?’

‘I know nothing. Which is why I’m here.’

The answer seemed to pacify him. He shuffled back, wiped his face with the back of his hand.

‘Do you know Mr Bentner?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Met him a couple of times, just like everyone else. Know him? No one knows him. Least of all now.’ He glanced at Bentner’s house. ‘Talk to my son. He kept that place together.’

‘What’s your son’s name?’

‘Gerry.’

‘Gerry what?’

‘Just Gerry.’

‘So what does he do? Gerry?’

‘What
doesn’t
he do, more like.’ A wheezy bark of laughter. ‘Carpentry, plumbing, electrics. No certificates, mind, but Gerry always does his best by Mr Bentner. Cheap too, which is just as well. That man counts his pennies, believe me.’

He talked about Bentner for a while, telling Lizzie how mean he was, except when it came to his bar bills.

‘You mean the pub?’

‘The shop down the road. Hundreds of quid across the counter for booze since he came down here. Must be. Talk to them. Talk to Doris.’

‘Doris?’

‘Runs the place.’

‘Thanks.’ Lizzie nodded down at the letter box. ‘And what about Gemma Caton?’

‘Nuts.’

‘Nuts?’

‘Talk to Gerry. He knows.’

Nineteen

T
HURSDAY, 12
J
UNE 2014, 14.07

The interview briefing at Middlemoor started late. The abortive hunt for Alois Bentner seemed to have taken the wind out of Det-Supt Nandy’s sails. DI Houghton had launched a search of all letter boxes on Dartmoor, but so far the teams had found nothing. She’d also secured RIPA warrants on two phone lines – Sheila Forshaw’s and Nikki Drew’s – but since Bentner had been in touch with Forshaw there’d been no word from him on either.

Buzzard
had also checked out the other two Met Office employees with the initials ND but had drawn a blank on both names. Neither had known Alois Bentner and both had cast-iron alibis for the weekend of Reilly’s death.

Not good. As the days went by Nandy had become more and more convinced that Bentner had either gone abroad using a false passport, or that the man was dead. His ancient Skoda, meanwhile, had been trucked back to Exeter and forensically searched, yielding nothing worthwhile.

Suttle wanted to know about the SOC take on Bentner’s premises. What had the scene told them?

Nandy looked at Carole Houghton. The SOC file had arrived this morning and she’d had time to go through it.

‘We’re looking at two key issues,’ she said. ‘Getting in and getting out. There’s no sign of forced entry. Reilly may have been in the property already with whoever killed her. She may have opened the door to them, or they may have had a key. Putting this report together with the post-mortem we’re thinking she was probably killed late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. We also think the disembowelling happened after she was clinically dead.’

This was news to Suttle. So how did the woman die?

‘She was beaten around the face and head and then suffocated. We’re also thinking she was killed in situ. Probably smothered with one of the pillows. There was less blood from the disembowelling than you might expect because she was dead before it happened. Whoever did it wouldn’t have been covered in the stuff. Which made getting out all the easier.’

‘No blood on the stairs?’ This from Golding.

‘None.’

‘Downstairs?’

‘Nothing.’

They were talking in a briefing room attached to the MIR. Nandy had been canny in his choice of detectives for the Dean Russell interviews. Rosie Tremayne was a seasoned interviewer with a memory schooled for retaining the smallest details. Face to face she could be disarmingly sympathetic, but Suttle always remembered one rueful suspect down for a manslaughter charge. ‘I trusted that Tremayne woman,’ he said, ‘and she turned me over.’

Rosie’s partner was a newcomer to Major Crimes, a DC from Penzance called Colin Myers, even younger than Golding. He had the face of an eighteen-year-old and the voice of a choirboy, and there was no way a man like Dean Russell wouldn’t regard him as a pushover. Underestimate either of these detectives, thought Suttle, and you’d be in serious trouble.

Nandy asked Suttle to deliver the intelligence that had led to this morning’s arrests. Suttle told them about Dean’s mother, Betty, and the circumstances surrounding her death. The news that she’d opted for assisted dying brought a frown to Tremayne’s face. She was the wife of a Church of England vicar. Assisted dying, as far as she was concerned, was within touching distance of suicide. In her world this stuff mattered.

‘It’s too late to do her for that, Rosie.’ This from Nandy. ‘She’s home free.’

‘That wasn’t my point, sir, with respect. I’m just wondering how much pressure she was under.’

Nandy shot Suttle a look.

Suttle remembered Lizzie in the restaurant describing Betty’s final weeks. ‘She was in great pain, Rosie,’ he said. ‘The initiative came from her.’

‘We’re sure about that?’

‘According to her best friend, yes. It’s down there in the statement. There’s a photocopy in your file.’ Suttle wondered whether to talk about Ralph and Jeff, two other witnesses to Reilly’s work at the bedside of the dying, but decided against it. The less that Lizzie’s work figured in
Buzzard
, the better.

Myers wanted to know more about Frances Bevan. Was she to any degree a benefactor from the change of wills?

‘No.’

‘She was left nothing at all?’

‘Not that I know of. I’ve got a call in to Betty’s solicitor. She’s yet to come back.’ It was a lie but a small one; Suttle had yet to make contact.

‘So how did you find this witness?’ The question came from Rosie Tremayne.

‘Through a journalist I know. He’s working up a piece on assisted dying.’

‘But why come to us? To you?’

‘Because he was worried about Bevan. Russell frightens her. She thinks he’s dangerous. In fact she thinks he’s off his head. She doesn’t want him knocking on her door. Ever.’

‘So she talked to the journalist?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he talked to you?’

‘Of course. We go back a while. It’s a trust thing.’

‘Are we allowed to know who he is?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

The bluntness of Suttle’s answer raised eyebrows around the room. Suttle was aware of Golding watching his every move. He knows, he thought. He’s bloody sussed it.

Nandy, to Suttle’s relief, came to the rescue.

‘Your call, son,’ he grunted, ‘but don’t make a habit of it.’

The briefing continued. Both Nandy and Houghton recognised that the two interviewing detectives would be facing an uphill battle with Tania Maguire. According to the Custody Sergeant at Heavitree she was going to press assault charges against Suttle and wanted a further million quid for the loss of her precious dog. The woman was clearly out of her tree, and whatever she said had to be treated with a great deal of caution, but there might be the odd evidential nugget in among all the rubbish. Key to everything, Nandy insisted, was the timeline. Russell and Maguire were offering mirror alibis, relying on each other’s words, but a couple this volatile might be easy to wind up.

‘We need to drop the odd hint about Russell. Suggest he might have been getting it elsewhere. No harm in making the woman wonder.’

It was a common tactic, cheap as you like, and most lawyers would jump on it at once, but
Buzzard –
as Nandy was the first to point out – was badly in need of a little TLC and in his view it was certainly conceivable that both of them might have made threats against Reilly, if only to make themselves feel better.

‘That’s not the same as killing her, sir,’ Suttle pointed out.

‘You’re right, son. We’ll have to wait for Bentner before we bottom this bloody thing out.’

Gerry turned out to live in Polsloe Bridge, a down-at-heel suburb of Exeter. Lizzie had wrung the address from his father in Lympstone. His second name was Piercy and he shared a downstairs flat with a woman called Gwendoline who had two young children. Lizzie had no idea whether the kids belonged to Gerry but it was obvious at once that this family needed more room.

The kids were three and four, pre-school, hyperactive. They tore from room to room, the little girl doing most of the chasing, her brother shouting fit to bust. Living on top of a floor show like this would require either earplugs or a great deal of patience. Gerry sought shelter in the front room, which was full of cardboard boxes. He seemed to believe that there was money waiting for him if he was able to give Lizzie what she was after, and to some degree he was right. She’d stopped off at an ATM on the drive up from Lympstone and withdrawn £200.

‘Tell me about Bentner,’ she said.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘You worked for him, right?’

‘Yeah. Bits and pieces when he needed me.’

‘You saw him often?’

‘Enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘Enough to know the kind of bloke he is.’

‘And?’

‘He’s all right. An all-right guy. My dad thinks he’s an arsehole. He’s not.’

As far as the property was concerned, he said, Mr Bentner had no interest in keeping the place up. He treated the house like a tent. He’d once told Gerry that if he could fold it up and cart it off, he’d do just that. Bentner enjoyed the situation, liked living with the view, but in his head he was as free as the air.

‘A Gypsy, right? That’s what he believed.’

Lizzie nodded. Gerry’s use of ‘Mr’ was significant. It meant he respected this man and probably liked him.

‘You knew his girlfriend? Harriet?’

‘Of course. Nice lady.’

‘Was she there a lot?’

‘I dunno. She may have been. When I was there it was always during the day unless there was an emergency, so I only met her a couple of times. You could tell though.’

‘Tell what?’

‘That they were … you know … tight.’

The kids were beating at the door. Any minute now they’d wrench the handle off. Gerry seemed impervious.

‘Your dad says Bentner drank a lot.’

‘That’s true.’ He shrugged. ‘If you’ve got the money, why not? Any port in a storm.’ His eyes at last flicked to the door. ‘If you’re asking me whether he killed her, the answer has to be no.’

‘That’s what you believe?’

‘That’s what anyone believes who ever took the time to give the guy a fair hearing. People like my dad? Excuse me saying so, but they never bother to listen. Like I say, the guy’s OK. If he chooses to disappear, that’s his business. Some days I wouldn’t blame him.’

He at last got to his feet and unlocked the door, shooing the kids back down the hall. Lizzie heard his partner complaining that she had no more tokens for the electric. Another hour and they wouldn’t have a kettle to boil water for tea.

Gerry returned, locking the door behind him. Lizzie sensed that time was tight.

‘The next-door neighbour,’ she said. ‘Gemma Caton. Your dad says you think she’s nuts.’

‘He’s right.’

‘Why nuts?’

‘She’s just a crazy woman. Bright, mind. Works at the university. Some kind of scientist? I don’t really know. But she plays this weird music, Balinese I think it is. I could hear it through the wall when I was working there.’

‘Does that make her nuts? Balinese music?’

‘It’s not just that. Mr Bentner says she’s got a thing about allergies, about what you do eat and what you don’t. Like no proper milk. No nuts. No cheese. I went in her house once. She had a leak in her boiler. All these weird carvings. African they looked like. Witch-doctor stuff. Creepy.’

‘You asked her about them?’

‘I couldn’t. She wasn’t there.’

‘So how did you get in?’

‘Mr Bentner has a key.’

‘Does he?’

‘Yeah. He says she’s away a lot. Field trips? I dunno. Anyway, he’s supposed to keep an eye on the place. In fact it was Mr Bentner who spotted the leak. That has to be a first for him.’

Lizzie felt a tiny prickle of excitement. Did Jimmy Suttle know this? Had Operation
Buzzard
bothered to swoop on Gemma Caton’s nest? Have a poke about? Ask a question or two?

There was a knock on the door, sterner this time. Gwendoline, Lizzie thought. With an ultimatum about the electricity meter.

Gerry was on his feet again. Lizzie joined him. Was he certain that she worked at the university?

‘Yeah.’

‘Department?’

‘Dunno.’

Lizzie thanked him for his time. The fold of notes from the ATM lay in her shoulder bag. She gave him the lot and wished him luck.

He stared down at the notes, and then counted them.

‘Fuck.’ He looked up. ‘Are you serious?’

Twenty

T
HURSDAY, 12
J
UNE 2014, 16.23

The interview with Dean Russell started late. His solicitor had been stuck in traffic at Kingskerswell, and it took another forty minutes before she was satisfied that her client had told her the whole story.

Rosie Tremayne and Colin Myers had been waiting in the interview room for nearly an hour. Tremayne opened by offering Russell her condolences on his mother’s death. When he didn’t respond, she asked him how close they’d been. This time he was more forthcoming.

‘Not at all close. Not ever.’

‘Why was that?’

‘My dad went off when I was a nipper. She was always rubbishing him. It got so bad I could see why he’d gone. Didn’t help me none, though.’

‘You blamed her?’

‘I did. She wound me up. Never failed. I’d go off, like, get hammered on cider or lighter fuel or whatever, get in trouble, get in a fight, and there’d she be on the doorstep when they took me home.’

‘Who took you home?’

‘The police. You lot. Tell you the truth I preferred you lot to her.’

‘But she was dying, Dean.’